How a Frog and Toad soft-shoed into our memories

But for those of us in the seats, it is not so easy to move on. That’s the magic, the ephemeral nature of reliving in our minds what is gone forever. I can still see Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson embracing on stage in “Anna Christie” in 1993. The show won a Tony and they wound up married. And for New Yorkers, such reminiscing about great theater is a form of theater itself.

I happened to attend the last performance of “A Year in the Life of Frog and Toad,” a musical based on four children’s books at the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street and Broadway. It is a charming tale of friendship between a worrying, twitchy Toad and a stable, silky-smooth Frog.

Near the end of the performance, my 6-year-old daughter leaned close to me and whispered, “Mommy, is it over? I don’t want it to be.”

But it ended, and therein lies the sadness and the glory. My little girl can reread the books, but she cannot relive the songs and dances by popping something in the VCR or DVD player. The theater is one of the last temporal experiences in an over-archived world. And while the show will surely be produced again -- maybe in an even better version this spring in a larger Broadway theater-- all my daughter has for now is her recollection of what happened on a crisp Sunday in December between two silly, soft-shoeing amphibians.

This is how one little girl’s vision came to be another little girl’s memory:

Long ago in Brooklyn, an 11-year-old girl named Adrianne who loved slimy animals went with her family to “the country,” as New Yorkers call any patch of grass beyond Central Park.

There, she caught a toad.

“What a nice frog you have there!” her father said.

“No, it’s a toad,” she replied, explaining the difference.

A year later, Arnold Lobel, an illustrator and author, began the “Frog and Toad” book series. The books caught on.

In the meantime, the little girl dreamed of becoming an artist like both of her parents. They took her to museums and plays, and after every good report card her father would spirit her away to a Fred Astaire movie.

But instead of going to college, the little girl, now 18, fled New York for Hollywood, and got jobs drafting and building set models in movie studios. After two years, she fled again, this time to the Yale School of Drama, where finally she met Toad, masquerading as a student named Mark Linn-Baker.

They were friends and collaborators for years before they married. Toad started a theater workshop, and starred in Broadway hits and for seven years in TV’s “Perfect Strangers.” Meantime, the little girl was designing sets for operas (John Adams’ “Nixon in China”), for Broadway (Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion”), and for choreographer Mark Morris.

In the mid-1990s the two friends began meeting regularly for late-night dinners after working on separate shows. Eventually the little girl, now an accomplished set designer, and Toad -- that’s Linn-Baker -- fell in love, for real, and in time embarked on two very big projects together -- a musical and parenthood.

The first was the musical.

“Marrying Mark had a lot to do with my adapting ‘Frog and Toad,’ ” says Lobel, 47. “He was always Toad in my head. And I always loved toads, and was offended by the frog-to-prince transition.”

It took six years for them to assemble a hive of friends and collaborators in theater who together created this unabashedly sentimental musical.

At the center of all these talented people was Adrianne Lobel, the little girl. She was the visionary, the producer, the pitchman, and inspiring her were her father’s beautiful little stories as well as her memory of all the things that he had loved.

Arnold Lobel, who died in 1987 at age 54, was passionate about jazz music and Fred Astaire-/Gene Kelly-style dancing and vaudeville gags and the gentility of Edwardian gentlemen. That was all in the script when the show opened last summer with glowing reviews first at the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis and then in November at the New Victory, and again at that wistful last performance in December.

The team of Lobel/Baker also completed another project in 2002: After six years of trying -- almost the same amount of time it took to bring their show to Broadway -- they brought their own little girl into the world, Ruby Beatrice Baker.

This week, I took a reluctant Lobel back to the New Victory. We entered through the stage door, and the security guard didn’t remember her and had to call “upstairs” before he let us in. The sets and costumes for “A Year in the Life of Frog and Toad” were packed in boxes and sent for storage somewhere in Connecticut.

Lobel didn’t even know where they were. The stage has been redesigned to house the Shanghai Circus. As we navigated the darkened backstage with unicycles strewn about, Lobel explained how her old-fashioned sets were perfectly suited for the New Victory, which has been every incarnation of theater in its 100 year history -- burlesque, vaudeville, porno movie house and now restored as a family theater.

It was the perfect cozy place for Frog and Toad and their animal friends who just days ago were alive there -- planting flowers, swimming, sledding, baking cookies, fighting, reconciling and singing such songs as “Getta Loada Toad.” Now they are gone.

Lobel pulls her coat around her, against the drafty, empty theater and heads for the exit. What’s done is done.